Schools Lure Parents To Councils

Educational Leaders Are Trying To Boost Interest In Local Panels Even As A Bitter Fracas Winds Down For One Council.

March 01, 1996|By Michael Martinez, Tribune Education Writer.

As the Chicago school board considers ousting the allegedly tyrannical Hale Local School Council, another council this week was going about its paces on a less theatrical, but more typical, issue arising from Chicago's 7-year-old local school council system.

In the working-class Brighton Park neighborhood on the Southwest Side, Principal Richard Morris of Burroughs School was alerting parents to what he believed was the biggest problem facing the governance of his school.

It wasn't necessarily the result of putting 450 students in an elementary school designed for 390.

Nor was it the peeling paint, leaking roof and drafty windows in the 104-year-old building.

It was merely getting parents involved.

To that end, the Burroughs Local School Council used an age-old political lure: They served a free breakfast of scrambled eggs, sausage patties and sweet rolls, all washed down with hot coffee, to about 35 parents and their toddler children in the school cafeteria.

After the Burroughs LSC opened its monthly meeting with the Pledge of Allegiance on a recent weekday morning, Morris pressed parents with a message that will be heard throughout Chicago over the next four weeks starting Friday.

Run, run, run for a seat on one of Chicago's 553 local school councils.

Without stronger parental support, Morris said he feared that Springfield may rethink the reform law and take away more than $300,000 in discretionary funds to the Burroughs Local School Council.

The Burroughs School breakfast at 3542 S. Washtenaw Ave. typified some mutual anxieties during this council election year, of parents intimidated by the prospect of public service and of council proponents desperate to field enough candidates to give voters a choice.

For council advocates, the Hale School controversy--which included accusations of council members misspending funds, bullying the principal, challenging teachers on grading policies, and insulting parents--could not have come at a more inopportune time. The Chicago school board is expected to make a decision on whether to disband the Hale council in the next week or so.

Burroughs council members tried to assuage any parental concerns about council politics with not only the free meal but plain talk about how council service can be an important, though at times humdrum, role.

During the candidate filing period--from Friday until March 27--Chicago schools are urging Chicagoans to become candidates for the six parent seats or the two community member seats on the 11-member elementary school councils. The other seats are occupied by two teachers and the principal.

The 12-member high school councils include a student representative.

The council elections will be held on report card pickup days in elementary schools on April 17 and in high schools on April 18.

Since the councils were created under a state reform law, the biennial council elections have experienced an increasingly poor participation rate. For example, the number of candidates dropped to 7,000 in 1993 from 17,000 in 1989. This year, school officials hope for 10,000 candidates for the 4,424 parent and community member seats, all non-paid.

To stave off the candidate apathy, the Burroughs council members outlined to parents what a typical meeting is like.

In the demonstration and later in interviews, Burroughs council members said the usual local council experience is far from the uncivil and venomous turmoil at Hale School on the Southwest Side, where the ruling faction of the council includes two brothers, one of their wives, and another woman and her daughter.

At Burroughs, with an enrollment that is 70 percent Latino, 24 percent white and 6 percent African-American, council Chairman James Baltazar said the council avoids the political pitfalls that have caused the Hale School calamity by urging cooperation and observing defined roles of authority.

Though Burroughs has had its share of problems, such as complaints two years ago by some teachers about a poor work enviroment, the local council and principal have resolved problems by recognizing each other's jurisdiction. The teachers' complaints subsided after a teacher's aide left the school, Baltazar said.

"People think all the LSCs have all this infighting and politics. That's not the case, especially here," Baltazar said. "We don't have politicking problems here."

But the political horror stories such as the Hale controversy made some Burroughs parents think twice about running for the council.

"A little of me is worried," said Huen Norman, 29, whose daughter Devin, 5, is in kindergarten there. "I don't know if I want to stick my hand into the fryer."

Her biggest reservation about running dealt with being a novice to public service.